From the Office and Backyard to the Road, Boat, or Plane–Backstories and
Side Stories While on Assignment. Updates on Personal Projects, Too.

About

Sandy is a fan of great photography and design, and printed pieces remain a favorite format. In addition to writing projects, she’s a producer with Peter Frank Edwards Photographs. She earned her B.A. in Journalism from the University of South Carolina, and studied fiction writing at California State University and in Charleston.

07.18

2013

Heard the sad news that T-Model Ford has died this week. I’ll never forget the day I met him, by chance, one morning in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Reprinting my 2008 post, here:

“I ain’t old no more.”

The music never seems to stop in Clarksdale, Mississippi. One morning there earlier this year, the first person we met on Delta Avenue was bluesman T-Model Ford, who was sitting in a folding chair eating eggs and toast from a foam tray, waiting for the Cat Head Delta Blues store to open. He told us he’d been hired to play a sidewalk concert, and would sing and play guitar again at a festival later that day. Right then though, it was just T-Model Ford, his wife, Stella, a couple of grandkids, and us. “When they find out I’m here, they gonna fill this place up,” the 80-something bluesman said. “Everybody wants to play with T-Model.” And he was right. As soon as he lifted his black Peavey guitar from the case (he calls it “Black Nanny”), a crowd started to fill from the just-empty streets, walking up and waiting for the music, which came slow, with devilish smiles, rasp and soul… like a mix of mud and fire.

I’ve written a story about our three nights in Mississippi to be published in early 2009. While there, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I also visited William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak and spent part of a pleasant morning with William Griffith, the curator there. I wanted to see more of the Mississippi places that have inspired so much writing and music.

Last week I was finishing final edits on the story when somehow, old T-Model turned up to play in a bar five miles from our house in South Carolina. Of course we went to see. This time he had a back-up band, and it all didn’t start until near midnight with amplifiers loud. The vibe was completely different, the crowd completely white. And in the dim and whiskey all I kept thinking was of other times, other places… the morning sun on a Mississippi sidewalk.

01.25

2009

The January issue of Charleston Magazine includes my travel piece on Mississippi. It’s the magazine’s first-ever Literary Arts Issue, and my story opens with a visit to William Faulkner’s longtime home.

Walking up the allée of cedars on a chilly morning in Oxford, Mississippi, there’s the feeling that you’ve arrived at one of those heavy places, thick-aired with the stories and life that you imagine and know must have existed there… at least that’s the way it feels to a writer (to me, at that moment) who wonders about the effect of place on writing, or conversely, the effect that a writer can have on a specific place.

I’d come to Rowan Oak, the homestead and William Faulkner’s white-columned house where the Nobel and Pulitzer-winning author lived for 32 years, writing stories of the South in flux… complicated, powerful tales. There looked to be no one else about, and I pushed open the front door, Faulkner’s front door. To the right was a small desk, and then a parlor to left that looked caught in a certain kind of mid-century South, with a piano and velvet chaises. I heard a man say. “Are you the writer giving the reading tonight at Square Books?” I looked around. No, I wasn’t giving a reading, but it became clear that the man was speaking to me. Obviously, I’d come to a place where the first assumption is that someone is a writer. (Pretty cool.)...

You can read the entire piece on the magazine’s re-vamped website. (The issue also includes winning entries from a fiction contest… plenty of fine writing in the magazine this month.)

01.06

2009

I am captivated by this time of year… the marsh grass is golden in clear evening light, bare branches of pecan trees stretch into the sky, flocks of red-winged blackbirds swirl over farm fields. There are indelible scenes everywhere. It’s a stark, beautiful season.

For a few years now, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I have regularly explored the South in cooler months on assignments, and along the way have developed a personal project, “Winter South.” Using some of the images from this project, last month we had a series of bookplates printed to share with friends and colleagues. (They are adhesive-backed, pretty nice quality.) If you’d like a bookplate or two, just let me know.

12.07

2008

The music never seems to stop in Clarksdale, Mississippi. One morning there earlier this year, the first person we met on Delta Avenue was bluesman T-Model Ford, who was sitting in a folding chair eating eggs and toast from a foam tray, waiting for the Cat Head Delta Blues store to open. He told us he’d been hired to play a sidewalk concert, and would sing and play guitar again at a festival later that day. Right then though, it was just T-Model Ford, his wife, Stella, a couple of grandkids, and us. “When they find out I’m here, they gonna fill this place up,” the 80-something bluesman said. “Everybody wants to play with T-Model.” And he was right. As soon as he lifted his black Peavey guitar from the case (he calls it “Black Nanny”), a crowd started to fill from the just-empty streets, walking up and waiting for the music, which came slow, with devilish smiles, rasp and soul… like a mix of mud and fire.

I’ve written a story about our three nights in Mississippi to be published in early 2009. While there, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I also visited William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak and spent part of a pleasant morning with William Griffith, the curator there. I wanted to see more of the Mississippi places that have inspired so much writing and music.

Last week I was finishing final edits on the story when somehow, old T-Model turned up to play in a bar five miles from our house in South Carolina. Of course we went to see. This time he had a back-up band, and it all didn’t start until near midnight with amplifiers loud. The vibe was completely different, the crowd completely white. And in the dim and whiskey all I kept thinking was of other times, other places… the morning sun on a Mississippi sidewalk.

04.02

2007

In mid-January Peter Frank and I flew to Key West with our new travel bikes in our suitcases. It takes about 10 minutes to assemble them. We did, and then we pedaled everywhere, swam in a cistern-turned-pool, took a now-blurry champagne sail, and ate lots of Cuban food. It was all pretty wonderful for wintertime. Later I wrote a piece for Charleston Magazine, excerpted here…

“I hear they’re buying up lots, and then… they’re going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.”

That’s what Albert and Captain Harry were saying about Key West, griping a bit while they sat around a bar on the farthest of the chain of islands that trail from southern Florida, stretching to within 90 miles of Cuba. Local fisherman Harry Morgan, a “Conch,” had lost an arm in a Cuban rum run gone bad, and the two men were considering a new contraband scheme to make money. Their conversation was part of Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel “To Have and Have Not.” And here I was, reading that chapter some 70 years later, while a very flat-faced, six-toed cat looked up at me from the patio of the one-time homestead of Papa Hemingway himself. (That variation passed down, it’s said, by the writer’s own cats.)

I’d come to Key West for some of the salt and flavor of a Hemingway novel, sure. And having visited before, knew to also expect plenty of T-shirt stores, the busy bars and boulevard, and the carnival-like scene at every sunset. Key West is definitely all of that, and draws on average about 20,000 tourists by car, boat and plane each day. But often on a recent four-day visit there, it wasn’t what Key West was, but what it wasn’t that was so pleasing. The 4.2-square-mile island was as noisy and colorful as anyone could want – the fire jugglers and acrobats, the beer stands with $2 go-cups to carry along Duval Street, the cross-dressing cabaret shows, the loud rock bands in clubs wide open to the street.

In many places, though, it was easy enough to pedal a block or two and find real tropical beauty and quieter character – we’d brought bicycles, the recommended transport for compact Key West. Pedaling or walking along, we’d often be on a side street and it would be just us and one or two of the island’s gypsy chickens (the bright fowl perch on rooftops, and strut along fences and sidewalks everywhere), or we’d get to a beach to find only a few other swimmers and sunbathers there. Collecting these scenes in my mind each day, I started to see Key West as more than a place to try to find the bars and masculine grit of Hemingway, or to watch or be part of the crazy-decadent parade on Duval. This time, Key West also gave me some of the feel that the most southerly island has possibly offered others since the United States purchased it in the 1820s from a Spanish colonial governor in Havana.

Three nights in a row I floated in a tile-edged pool after dark – an old cistern, they said – in water warmed to over 90 degrees, and looked up through palm trees at the stars. Twice, I was the only one in the pool. And the one night when two other couples were also there, I dunked under to swim, and heard nothing but the sound of bubbles – not even a rooster crowing. It was magical.Reflecting on Hemingway’s words, I think becoming “a beauty spot for tourists” was a certain destiny for Key West. What else could the warm, sunny island become – positioned where it is as far south as a person can drive – in a land of people who always want to go as far as they can?